"The gas at the head of the cloud is now stretched over more than 160 billion kilometres around the closest point of the orbit to the black hole. And the closest approach is only a bit more than 25 billion kilometres from the black hole itself — barely escaping falling right in," said Stefan Gillessen at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics.

"The cloud is so stretched that the close approach is not a single event but rather a process that extends over a period of at least one year."

The front end of the cloud has already passed the black hole and is speeding back towards our part of the galaxy at more than 1% the speed of light.

Take a look at the death spiral's progress in the video above.

59 Incredible Space Photos

59 Incredible Space Photos

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Dusty Space Cloud

This image shows the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy in infrared light as seen by the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency-led mission with important NASA contributions, and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. In the instruments' combined data, this nearby dwarf galaxy looks like a fiery, circular explosion. Rather than fire, however, those ribbons are actually giant ripples of dust spanning tens or hundreds of light-years. Significant fields of star formation are noticeable in the center, just left of center and at right. The brightest center-left region is called 30 Doradus, or the Tarantula Nebula, for its appearance in visible light.